County correctly abolishes office of jury commissioner

The two Republican Chester County commissioners made the wise choice last week in voting to abolish the fundamentally obsolete office of county Jury Commissioner, at last falling in line with other counties of our size and population. The position had become an anachronism in an era of a computerized, automated jury selection process, and was costing county taxpayers an unnecessary $76,000 a year. In an economic climate that sees county workers laid off or asked to subsist on slow rising salaries, paying even the slightest amount of tax dollars to keep in place an office more in tune with the late 19th century or early 20th century would have been inexcusable, and we credit Chairman Terence Farrel and Commissioner Ryan Costello for seeing the issue correctly.

We note that commissioners’ Vice Chairwoman Kathi Cozzone took a principled stance that she wanted to insure that juries are chosen impartially, without fear or favor, and that she viewed the two jury commissioners, one chosen from the respective major political parties, as essential to the checks and balances of the system. But Cozzone diminished her argument by saying she thought the current automated system which is designed to create the larger jury pool accomplished the goal of providing the courts with a widespread, diverse group of people from which to select jury panels in criminal and civil cases.

Instead, Cozzone, in casting her vote against the resolution abolishing the position, focused on the task fulfilled by the two jury commissioners of excusing individuals summoned for jury duty from the pool. That focus was ill-placed, and misses the point of creating an impartial and transparent jury pool.

The reason for the creation of the jury commissioners’ office in the years after the Civil War was a concern that one political party or the other would manipulate the list of people chosen to serve on juries in a particular county to favor one above another.

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Having a Democrat in office to place a check on a Republican officeholders’ ability to call only jurors from his or her party was a good idea then, when panels then were chosen by humans, name by name, from voter registration rolls. Today, all that is done by a machine, with the press of a button (so to speak), with software effectively sorting out any outward bias in the selection of names of potential jurors.

What the jury commissioners maintain they provide as a vital service is ruling on who should or should not be excused from jury service. But those valid reasons for not having to serve, or for being postponed, are already well established. It is only the few cases where an individual who is somehow answerable to the overall electorate is asked to determine whether to excuse a juror or not from the overall pool. That task, however, is not akin to creating bias or partiality in the jury selection process. If an individual is allegedly excused from service improperly, we believe that is not the same as creating a skewed list of potential jurors designed to rule in one way or another. Excusing jurors is not the same as excluding them.

Now that the question of the obsolescence of the jury commissioners’ office is out of the way, should it not be time to turn the Legislature’s attention to the office of Prothonotary? Or Recorder of Deeds? We wait in anticipation.